Humans On The Loop: Wisdom for an Age of Magical Technologies

Episodes

• 
  What Buddhist Epistemology Teaches Us about The Future of AI 17.08.2026 1h 49m

  For Part Two in our Continual Learning mini-series, Dr. Nadav Amir of The University of Ottowa joins me and guest co-host Dr. Adam Safron of Tufts University for a trialogue on the fundamental role of goals in intelligence.Nadav draws on behavioral neuroscience, Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti, control and information theory, and John Vervaeke’s work on “relevance realization” to formally articulate what many wisdom traditions have argued for millennia: what you take to be “reality” — your world and self — is a function of goal-based representations, state descriptions and reward functions create each other, and “what is” and “what do I care about” are two sides of the same thing. You can’t separate what you want from what you experience and what you are capable of. But this means that if you change your goals your reality will shift, and your sense of self with it. The opposite is also true: change the way you organize the the ineffable structure of reality into a conceptual framework, and you’ll care about very different things. Thanks to the pace of change we’re living through this kind of transformative experience now, so it’s a good time to ask:If selves are a kind of falsification, why do we have them in the first place? Does AI need goals of its own in order to be truly intelligent?And perhaps the deepest question we ask in this episode:How if at all can we develop better frameworks for deciding what we want our intelligent machines to become — and who we want to become alongside them?Thanks to the Survival and Flourishing Fund for their support of this mini-series. If you’d like more of this kind of work in the world:✨ Support my research, writing, and podcast with a tax-deductible donation✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future✨ Hire me for public speaking or advisory work with your organization✨ Browse and buy the books we mention on the show at Bookshop.org✨ Stream and download my tunes at artist-owned music co-op Subvert.fm✨ Continual Learning theme song: “Substrate Dynamics” by Neon Chameleon✨ Learn more about how we’re applying these ideas at Atlas Research Group, my team building sovereign infrastructure for collective intelligenceChapters0:00:00 Teaser0:01:48 Intro0:05:42 Who is Nadav Amir?0:08:15 Why we can’t separate goals from descriptions0:15:32 The Ugly Duckling Theorem & why taxonomy is not reality0:25:07 Evolution, karma, and non-conceptual awareness0:31:04 If selfhood is wrong, when is it practical?0:34:14 Suffering without a self & the value of wrong descriptions0:38:14 Non-conceptual experience & active inference0:41:07 Multiple nested hierarchical descriptions in minds & economies0:46:07 What’s missing from current approaches?0:50:09 Does greater agency mean better optimization or greater adaptability?0:57:04 Empowerment-based causal learning without a ground truth0:59:06 Intermission0:59:58 Transformative experiences & multiple levels of granularity1:05:19 No fixed models, no fixed environments1:10:55 Fundamental tradeoffs1:16:57 Reverse-engineering the centered self1:19:54 Does AI need goals to be intelligent and can we control AI if it has them?1:26:47 Does Nadav’s framework pertain for all possible minds?1:32:37 Mind as a property of collectives & goals as embedded in environments1:41:33 How can Nadav’s framework improve AI governance discourse?1:48:59 OutroMentioned ResourcesA Dharmakīrtian Model of Relevance Realization in Cognitive Agentsby Nadav Amir & John DunneAn exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligenceby Daniel Kahneman et al.Cognitive glues are shared models of relative scarcities: the economics of collective intelligenceby Michael Levin & Benjamin LyonsReverse-Engineering The Centered Selfby L.A. Paul et al.Agency and Experience: Buddhist and Cognitive Perspectivesa Yin Cheng Conference @ PrincetonKnowing and Guessingby Satosi WatanabeOntological Laughter: Comedy as Experimental Possibility Spaceby Timothy MortonSelves as Perspectives: From Biological Life to Superintelligence and a Bodhisattva Projectby Thomas Doctor et al.What The Frog’s Eye Tells The Frog’s Brainby J. Y. Lettvin et al.The Center for the Study of Apparent SelvesExplore the entire open-access special issue here:And whether you read the papers or not, be sure to check out this illuminating interactive discourse map by Van Bettauer of Ideoscopic to help you navigate where these researchers agree, disagree, and point toward future study:(Long-time fans will also want to check out his re-imagined interface for AskFutureFossils.com, complete with simulated debates between my guests!) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Continual Learning: World Models in Natural & Artificial Intelligence with Adam Safron 30.07.2026 1h 17m

  What does it actually mean for a machine to “understand” the world? Are today’s auto-regressive LLMs truly reasoning, or is statistical text prediction fundamentally distinct from genuine deliberative agency and causal inference? And how do we move away from brittle, post-hoc safety patches toward intrinsic, system-level alignment?This week begins Continual Learning, a new mini-series co-hosted with my friend and colleague, cognitive scientist Dr. Adam Safron of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and the Active Inference Institute. For the last year, we’ve been working together with the support of Survival and Flourishing Fund to advance scientific understanding and silo-crossing conversation around AI capabilities, alignment, and regulation—centered on a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society A on World models in natural and artificial intelligence co-edited by Adam and Michael Levin. The next several episodes are a meaningful detour into this work.Over the coming season, we’ll dive deep into cognitive neuroscience, complex systems science, the study of narratives, and Buddhist epistemology to explore what true world modeling entails. This episodes launches that investigation by identifying major major themes from the special issue and connecting dots between its papers. (Strap in, because we move a million miles an hour.) Some of the questions we raise include:* How do we rigorously define what a world model is—and isn’t?* Do machines need goals, intrinsic motivation, and deliberation to truly think?* What is the relationship between world-modeling and agency?* Where can we look for evidence of emergent structure in scaling LLMs, and what does it mean if we don’t find it?* How can we structure scientific collaboration to ask better questions about the future of human-machine co-evolution…and what might it take for machines to actively participate in that inquiry?Explore the entire open-access special issue here.And whether you read the papers or not, be sure to check out this illuminating interactive discourse map by Van Bettauer of Ideoscopic to help you navigate where these researchers agree, disagree, and point toward future study.(Long-time fans will also want to check out his re-imagined interface for AskFutureFossils.com, complete with simulated debates between my guests!)Subscribe for amazing conversations with Nadav Amir, John Krakauer, Fritz Breithaupt, Michael Levin, and many more!✨ Hire me to help you and your team identify your blind spots and make better sense✨ Support my research, writing, and community work with a tax-deductible donation✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future✨ Browse and buy the books we mention on the show at Bookshop.org✨ Stream and download my tunes at artist-owned music co-op Subvert.fm✨ Continual Learning theme song: “Substrate Dynamics” by Neon Chameleon✨ Learn more about how we’re applying these ideas at Atlas Research Group, my team building sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligenceChapters00:00 Teaser01:58 Intro06:04 We’re finally doing this06:35 Adam’s context on this series11:38 Michael’s context on this series16:09 Bringing together this special issue20:34 The cognitive equivalent of an airplane wing?26:56 Connecting goals and intrinsic motivation31:29 Requisite diversity in scientific and machine intelligences38:41 Is there an “I” in AI, and does it need constraints?41:48 Does consciousness emerge, and how is it not capability?47:45 Misattributing mind vs. missing mind55:28 Why is it so hard to make an AI scientist?1:02:43 The promise of a new economy1:08:52 Embodiment and alternative architectures1:13:45 Where do we go from here?1:17:34 OutroOther MentionsActive Inference Symposium 2025 roundtable discussion with Karl J Friston, Michael Garfield, Adam Safron, Alexander Ororbia, Hongju Pae:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTivWre-8KkRay Kurzweil — The Singularity is NearErik Hoel — The Overfitted Brain: Dreams Evolved to Assist GeneralizationW. Brian Arthur — The Nature of TechnologyNicholas Carr — The Glass CageKevin Kelly — The Handoff to BotsSteven Johnson — Revenge of The HumanitiesHumans On The Loop is committed to better collective sensemaking and the production of public goods. Thank you for your support! Learn more here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Visionary Ventures & The AI-Native Avant-Garde with William Morgan of Restless Egg 25.06.2026 1h 3m

  Today’s guest is William Morgan, the co-founder of Restless Egg, a London-based incubator and accelerator designed specifically for a new class of “artist-founders” whose work synthesizes art, technology, and commercial product design.His thesis: The tech sector’s obsession with optimization can’t help us discover the genuinely novel forms of human experience that this intelligent substrate makes possible. If we want something truly better, we need to cultivate the taste and discernment to know which futures are worth living in — and radically expand our imagination regarding what human-machine relationships can actually look like.✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future✨ Browse and buy the books we mention on the show at Bookshop.org✨ Stream and download my music at artist-owned (!) Subvert.fm✨ Learn about Atlas Research Group, my new team building sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligence.Chapters00:00 Teaser: Taste & Sovereign Choice02:46 Intro 06:41 Meet William Morgan 08:05 The Origins of The Avant-Garde 10:09 Taste and Abundance 12:12 Luxury Tech and Experience 15:57 Why Experiment? 20:21 Venture Models and Niches 25:20 The Sense Organs of Society 30:51 Rethinking Venture Incentives 38:54 Slop and Subculture Rebellion 47:13 Beyond “In” or “Out” 50:51 Founder Experiments Showcase 57:03 Scenius is Real ValueMentionedRestless Egg’s Half Dozen NewsletterArt Is Everything You Don’t Have To Do by Cory DoctorowThe Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham FlexnerThis collective is radically rethinking what it means to make art by Thom Waite at Dazed DigitalThe Dimensions of Experience by Andrew P. SmithMount Analogue  by René DaumalThe Nerves of Government  by Karl DeutschWhy Software is Eating The World by Marc AndreessenY Combinator’s Simple Agreement for Future EquityCommon As Airby Lewis HydeStanding by Wordsby Wendell BerryRight Story, Wrong Storyby Tyson YunkaportaFall by Neal StephensonThe Politics of Visionby Lydia NochlinThe Key to Science Fictionby Damien WalterFlora WeilAntithykeraCCRULuciana ParisiGeorge BatailleMatthew David Segall This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Rewilding Collective Attention: Bioregional Design for Life Online with Andrea Farias 16.06.2026 1h 27m

  ✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future✨ Browse and buy the books we mention on the show at Bookshop.org✨ Stream and download my music at artist-owned (!) Subvert.fm✨ Learn about Atlas Research Group, my new team building sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligenceIn the last episode, my conversation with C. Thi Nguyen explored “value capture”: his term for what happens when our scoring systems define what we care about and ultimately our identities. In this episode, we ask what it means to reverse this process — what you might call “value emancipation” — with Andrea Farias (LinkedIn), a Barcelona-based researcher and builder whose guiding mission to is to support the transition to a regenerative civilization aligned with the flows of our planet.Andrea investigates how digital technologies can accelerate this transition, crafting information ecosystems that reimagine knowledge creation and resource allocation. But her path to this life required some serious unlearning and a rocky road out of her prior incarnation as a healthcare tech product strategist.We invite you to ask the same questions she did, and which we ask in this converstion:• When I decouple from the desires I’ve identified with, what is worth taking their place?• How do we design and adopt technologies from this new, more spacious identity?• How does the local determination of plural value help us restore necessary context to human-scale decision-making?• How do we navigate the tensions between the place-ful realm of community and the placeless realm of global coordination?• Where do we need friction in our digital lives, and how can ecology and bioregionalism inspire visions for a better Web?• What does it mean to be “local to an idea or a narrative” and how does that cyber-locality interface with geographic locality?• Where do we still want abstraction for coordination at scale?Tune in for a deep dialogue on how to care for the processes that actually create life — and what it means to enact regenerative principles to personal and collective health, technology and economy.(Fun fact: although she wasn’t at the time of this recording, Andrea is now a member of Atlas Research Group! So we will definitely be doing more together…)Special AnnouncementJoin me at the Weirdosphere online learning platform for “Transcendence in the Age of AI” — where we’re hosting an interactive screening of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001) on June 23rd and chasing it on June 25th with a deep-cut conversation between myself and two wonderful writers and film-makers: Weird Studies co-host JF Martel and Joel Gunz of Macguffin Media. Fresh ideas guaranteed! The viewing party is free to all; the follow-up dialogue and group discussion is $20 USD.Register here. Founding Members on Substack and Patreon can join for free, as always! Reach out if you are one and would like the free registration link.Chapters00:00 Replacing Habits With Values01:47 Introduction05:39 Job Creation vs. Job Destruction08:04 Enoughness & Bigger Desires Than “More”11:00 Andrea’s Story of Crisis & Transformation23:04 Limits, Care, & Post-Growth30:44 Bioregionalism, Currency, And Web340:40 Tokenization Tradeoffs42:09 Governance Starts Local44:42 Rewilding Digital Biomes49:42 The Fractal Cozy Web55:29 AI Translation And Legibility01:04:48 Bioregional Finance Experiments01:11:16 Protocols, Enforcement, & Values01:25:18 Closing & ThanksMentionsAndrea’s Website (which may not work; she’s extremely busy doing real stuff)Andrea’s Substack (which is fallow due to aforementioned real stuff but maybe a surge of new followers will inspire her to publish more of her excellent writing here)Kate Raworth - Doughnut EconomicsJack D. Forbes - Indigenous Spirituality & EthosYancey Strickler - Postcapitalism for RealistsThe Consilience Project - Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic DesignHenry’s Zoo - The Limits and “Good” of Public GoodsJames Bridle - Ways of Being This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
• 
  Games & Metrics: Agency as Art & Artifice with C. Thi Nguyen 26.05.2026 1h 35m

  ✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org✨ Stream and download my music at artist-owned Subvert.fm✨ Learn about Atlas Research Group, my new team on a mission to build sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligenceAbout This EpisodeThis week’s guest is C. Thi Nguyen (Website | Wikipedia | X), associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and a specialist in the philosophy of games, the philosophy of technology, and the theory of value. In our first conversation on Future Fossils, we explored his writing on games as an art form in which agency is the medium. His new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, takes that logic further and reveals the games that bind society together with institutional metrics — one of the most powerful, pervasive, and invisible technologies of all time.Thi’s thesis hinges on the observation that a metric is never just a number. It’s a value judgment dressed up in the costume of objectivity, a down-sampling of our richly multidimensional world into proxies that can travel efficiently between strangers. And with every subsequent compression of meaning into portable, scalable, decontextualized form, our metrics progressively displace place itself — the nuance of our singular, non-fungible lives — and define what we can even aspire to be.Thi calls this kind of cognitive enclosure “value capture”: when an institution uses metrics to coordinate across distance and difference, it engineers a context-invariant kernel that can travel between strangers without requiring shared background, history, or care. The power of these abstractions is real. So is their violence.We can use metrics instrumentally, holding them lightly as useful fictions. But more often than not we forget things like GPA, GDP, or KPIs started life as somebody else’s choices — that someone, somewhere, decided what to count and what to ignore — and we begin to inhabit the metric as if it were reality itself: optimizing our lives, desires, and identities for a scoring system we didn’t author and may never have consciously accepted.Games show us another way. By Thi’s account, games are a medium for the transmission of different kinds of agency, a technology for practicing the very awareness that metrics erode: that metrics are cultural constructs, and we still have some choice in what to value. When you’re playing, you know you’re playing. The magic circle of the game space is a low-stakes laboratory for inhabiting a different set of values, and therefore different selves. Therein lies a whole philosophy of freedom, and in a moment when the infrastructure of meaning-making is being rebuilt from the ground up, recovering our capacity to see the game of modern life as a game may be the most important skill we have.But there’s a twist that takes us beyond the scope of Thi’s book and into the question that’s been keeping me up at night for the last two years. With AI, we’ve tunneled so far into abstraction that we may have come out the other side. Large language models now allow us to translate between different perspectives, to ground insights from our aggregate intelligence in personal detail. If you’ve ever used a chatbot to explain physics to you as a specific human being, based on your own data vault, and in the style of a specific author, you know what I mean. Socrates’ critique of written language in Phaedrus — that it couldn’t “read the room” or know its audience — feels somewhat less relevant in an age when the generation of text is powered by systems with such a high-dimensional and granular view of things that we are no longer bound to one canonical version of anything. Is AI the apotheosis of our enclosure by institutional metrics, or is it the medium through which we are finally able to take a post-ironic stance on the constraints of modern life?It’s starting to look like a world in which everything is a metric and everything is a game. And just maybe, that means we can renegotiate these tradeoffs…as long as we don’t take ourselves too seriously.And with this, we circle back around to the core question of this project: As we approach the horizon where anything is possible, what should be? Who do you want to be, and what games will make you that person?Chapters00:00 Episode Teaser03:50 Intro Monologue09:11 Meet C. Thi Nguyen17:43 Value Capture Explained23:48 The Gap between Measured & Valued35:29 Recognition vs. Perception42:48 Games vs. Institutions46:43 Is Meaning Control an Interface Problem?49:09 How Rules Became Algorithms54:17 Fungibility & Monocropping56:38 Is Coordination at Scale a Red Herring?01:03:14 Art Provides Hope01:16:17 AI Futures & Values01:32:27 Thanks & AnnouncementsMentioned ResourcesAre humans destined to evolve into crabs? by Michael GarfieldCoarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism by Jessica FlackThe Computer as a Communication Device by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert TaylorPaul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems with Value Metrics & Governance at Scale (EPE 06) for Complexity PodcastThe natural selection of bad science by Paul Smaldino & Richard McElreathSlowed canonical progress in large fields of science by Johan Chu & James EvansJargon is a Moat by Second VoiceTrust in Numbers by Theodore PorterRules by Lorraine DastinSeeing Like A State by James C. ScottThe Power of Maps by Dennis WoodsDilla Time by Dan CharmasMetaphors We Live By by George Lakoff & Mark JohnsonMarshall McLuhanReiner KniziaLangdon WinnerSamantha MatherneIain McGilchristKevin Kelly🎧 Ideas That Matter: Discussing Against Identity & Standing by Words📖 Prophetic Culture Book Club Recording194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions175 - C. Thi Nguyen on The Seductions of Clarity, Weaponized Games, and Agency as Art42 - William Irwin Thompson, Part 1 (Thinking Together at the Edge of History)Suggested Additional ListeningCo-Evolving with Magical Technologies feat. Sam ArbesmanChaim Gingold on Building SimCity & Simulation as DiscourseThe Architecture of The Next Creative Economy with Michael DeanScale Theory: Contemplating Everything-At-Onceness with Joshua DiCaglioAishwarya Khanduja on Living Inquiry & Fostering Imagination This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
• 
  Collective Futurecrafting: Play, Trauma, and The Duty of Care with Mathew Mytka 27.04.2026 1h 23m

  ✨ Like/Subscribe/Comment where you listen! YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts✨ Become a member for our reading group, community calls, and years of members-only recordings — including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry. Our next call is this weekend, May 2, at 2 pm MDT!This week I decant a conversation with the brilliant Mathew Mytka (Website | LinkedIn) — a self-described “Earthian living on and learning from the Country of the Bidjigal, Gweagal and Kamay clans of the Dharawal Nation, in Sydney, Australia.”Mat is a moral imagineer, social entrepreneur, UX designer, educator, artist, and public policy advocate. Cofounder (with Alja Isakovic) of the the inquiry-driven social venture Tethix and mission steward (with Gemma Palmer) of Collective Futurecrafting, Mat has over twenty years’ of product, project, and program management experience, designing and running real-world relational experiments everywhere from startups to federal government initiatives, Fortune 500 tech companies, and grassroots communities. He also makes delightfully weird code-as-art projects like The Ministry of Futility, a bureaucratic adventure game where players navigate a maze of pointless decisions.In short, he’s precisely the kind of incompressible generalist I look to as a model for how to live wisely in our age of accelerating weirdness.Mat and I met in 2024 in the group chat that spawned the Wisdom x Technology Discord Server and immediately realized a common thread ran through both our lives: a commitment to fostering our collective imagination aimed at ecologically-grounded, mutualistic, more-than-human futures.In today’s episode we riff on themes from the Tethix blog and podcast, including:• How do we embrace the lunacy of tech?• What should we do with the time that new technologies save? (if they even do) and• How do we nuture weird online communal gardens where we can play together?We also draw from the Tethix codesign principles, product ethos, and elemental ethics documents.Along the way we explore the fundamental problems of scale and institutional misalignment, the value of ritual, and the return to embodiment.✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future.✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org✨ Music: “Scalar Reconfigurations”Chapters00:00 Intro06:02 Starting Over With Play08:05 Mat’s Origin Story13:56 Online Performance and Anxiety18:24 How Tethix Began40:07 Teaching The State about The Duty of Care46:26 Collective Futurecrafting from Circles to Bioregions47:05 Start With What Exists48:34 Pivot Beyond Tech Ethics50:08 Weird Gardens for Online Community57:42 Composting The Leviathan01:01:48 Trauma, Empathy, Care01:13:11 Agency Rituals and Closing This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Neuroscience in Hyperspace with Andrew Gallimore 25.03.2026 1h 34m

  In this episode we join pioneering psychedelic neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore (Website | X | Instagram | Substack) to probe the bewildering high-dimensional horizons of DMT research and their implications for our understanding of consciousness and the structure of reality. In his book Death by Astonishment, Gallimore argues DMT expands the brain’s “representational reach,” enabling perception of high-dimensional structures and apparent interaction with non-human “intelligent agents,” challenging standard accounts that treat the experience as mere hallucination, dreams, or Jungian archetypes. What new shapes will we—and our sciences—take as we integrate the intense strangeness of these experiences? How do we even begin to practice “truly psychedelic” science? And what insights might we be able to bring “home” to the Flatland where we spend most of our waking lives?Andrew has talked about this work in many, many other venues (his conversations with Jesse Michels and Danny Jones were especially good), so I wanted to carry the conversation into fresh terrain. Consider this episode the “200 level course”, or at least my best attempt ask a brilliant and provocative researcher some very complicated questions.Over our two hours together we discussed neuroimaging findings that challenge the “dream” and “archetype” interpretations of DMT phenomenology, how criticality and noise in complex systems inform our understanding of the psychedelic experience, and the methodological problems inherent in studying ontologically shocking experiences while maintaining scientific rigor. We also probed the philosophical implications of DMT research—such as the possibility that consciousness is more fundamental than matter—and the possible connections between DMT hyperspace and life in an era of advanced technology. Andrew also gave some context on the Noonautics research non-profit its partnership with the newly-launched Eleusis facility, a carefully-crafted venue for extended-state DMT work. But perhaps my favorite part of this conversation was spent in speculation, about how science and even language might evolve to meet the challenges presented by the ineffable high-dimensional reality that DMT reveals to us.✨ Like/Subscribe/Comment where you listen! YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts✨ Become a member for our reading group, community calls, and years of members-only recordings — including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry.✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future.✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org✨ Music: “Scalar Reconfigurations” & “City of Jewels”✨ Contact me to collaborate or hire me as a consultantChapters00:00:00 Intro00:08:15 Gallimore’s Origin Story00:13:00 DMT as a Technology00:20:01 “Entities” & Methodological Problems00:29:06 World Models and EEG Clues00:36:57 Why The Psychedelic State is Not a Dream00:44:11 Noise, Criticality, and New Order00:47:50 The Temperature-Noise Motif00:52:47 Metabolism & Dimensionality00:53:47 The Cortex & Representational Reach00:57:44 Do We Need New Language to Study The DMT Realm?01:00:45 Is There Only The Subject?01:09:31 Psychedelic Science As Altered Observation01:17:34 DMTx & Eleusis Plans01:21:55 The Future of Transdimensional Research01:31:44 A Call for HumilityCited WorksNeural correlates of the DMT experience assessed with multivariate EEGby Christopher Timmerman et al.The Overfitted Brainby Erik HoelThe evolution of syntactic communicationby Martin Nowak et al.The Transcension Hypothesisby John SmartMiguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Societyfor Complexity PodcastAncient Extinction Events, Apocalyptic Cults, and DMT Entitieswith Michael on The Danny Jones PodcastOther MentionsStephen SzáraNick SandDonald HoffmanKarl FristonJordi RibaDavid ChalmersWilliam BurroughsJohn LillyPhil DickTerence McKennaRobert Anton WilsonJohn D. BarrowMentioned & Related Podcast Episodes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  (Re)Building Trustworthy Institutions with Nathan Kinch 11.03.2026 1h 25m

  Today’s very overdue conversation is with AI ethicist and organizational trust expert Nathan Kinch of Trustworthy By Design (Website | LinkedIn), asking questions like: How do institutions made of decent, well-meaning people continue to behave out of alignment with their stated values? How do we dig ourselves out of a catastrophic collapse in trust? How can we design practical, participatory “living labs” for organizational reflection and facilitate convivial, playful environments for working together?“Certainly one of the world’s leading figures on ethics in practical applications.”— Fionn Delahunty, NLP Lab at University of GalwayAs we frequently observe on this show, we need to rework our ideas of agency and identity to adapt them to advances in our understanding of complex systems. Decisions emerge within a nexus of nested, multi-scale dynamics, and our species flourishes or fumbles in intricate symbiotic relationships with the collective intelligences embodied in cultural technologies like states, markets, corporations, and social clubs — beings that, by any reasonable account, live in worlds alien to our own lived experience and demonstrate their own goals and values. Getting them to behave in ways that nourish us requires a much more nuanced theory of change than that which created them in the first place, perhaps even a radically different vision of the links between biology, psychology, society, and environment. And given that AI is a beast of a similar order to these other “egregores” — the entities of collective computation that arise from our efforts to coordinate at scale and then impose their own top-down causal influence on our thoughts and actions — learning how to align individual and organizational purpose can give us profound insight into how to live well alongside (or in the proverbial guts of) newer, more obvious forms of non-human intelligence like LLMs that amplify our biases through lossy compression and feedback, and shape both our desires and view of adjacent possibility.In other words, the “intent-to-action” gap in corporate ethics and the “paperclip machine” problem in our built wilderness of black box super-machines are structurally identical. And if we can “tame” the secular gods of the modern industrial era , our self-domesticated species may actually still get a chance at living in a zoo of our own choosing.If you are caught in a system of technologically mediated social dilemmas — and who isn’t? — this will speak to you, and I’m excited to share it.✨ If you enjoy this podcast, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting wherever you listen: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Etc.✨ Become a member for access to our study group and community calls, and for those recordings — including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry.✨ Become a founding member for access my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere and the raw recordings of every unreleased episode! (Anyone can chat with my course transcripts in a dedicated Google Notebook here.)This is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a member:✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org✨ Contact me with inquiries or hire me as a consultantReferenced & RelatedWhat’s trust got to do with it?Nathan KinchThree reasons why AI ethics is strugglingNathan KinchIf ‘Trust is a must’ for AI governance — here are 3 things regulators should doHilary SutcliffeBluesky and enshittificationCory DoctorowEnvironmentally Mediated Social DilemmasSylvie Estrela et al.FLD On Navigating Complexity in Education: A Conversation with Dave SnowdenTim LoganThe corporate cultivation of digital resignationNora Draper & Joseph TurowWilliam GibsonJohn VervaekeRajiv SethiMat MytkaNadia LeeBarronness Onora O’Neill This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  AI Doesn't Have To Be This Way feat. Alex Komoroske 10.02.2026 1h 21m

  This week go deep with Alex Komoroske, CEO and co-founder of Common Tools, about his vision for a more saner, more intentional tech paradigm in which the historical contingencies that gave us the digital world we have today have been fundamentally reworked.The version of AI most of us have come to accept or reject looks like corporate-owned super-assistants with all your data. Instead, we could have a decentralized ecosystem where software self-assembles around you—private, personal, and prosocial. Alex speaks on this possible world with authority: he spent 13 years at Google as PM Director on Chrome’s web platform, Search, and AR, and later led corporate strategy at Stripe before co-founding Common Tools with Bernhard Seefeld.Some of the waypoints in our conversation include: confidential compute, emergent ontologies, where we want friction, the tyranny of the marginal users, the rise of the generalist, the importance of context ownership, and software ephemerality.We can’t take a reasonable principled stance on the promises and perils of AI without considering the vast unexplored possibility space that Alex opens in this conversation. I’m grateful that I get to share it with you and help light the way for promising alternatives to what many of us have come to accept as “the way things are.”Links to extensive additional reading and listening below!✨ If you enjoy this podcast, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting wherever you listen: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Etc.✨ Become a member to support the show and score myriad perks, like our book club: our next call is on Wendell Berry’s Standing by Words this Sunday, Feb 15th!✨ Become a founding member for access to my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere and the raw recordings of every unreleased episode! (Anyone can chat with my course transcripts in a dedicated Google Notebook here.)✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org✨ Contact me with inquiries or hire me as a consultantReferenced & Related• The FLUX Collective (team project w/ several people mentioned in this episode)• Bits and Bobs (Alex’s long-running archive of weekly notes)• Common Ground (Alex’s dialogues w/ Aishwarya Khanduja of The Analogue Group)• The Iterative Adjacent Possible (Alex on Medium)• The Runaway Engine of Society (Alex on Medium)• Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice (podcast w/ Lenny Rachitsky)• Media and Machines by Anu Atluru at Working Theorys• Accelerando & Glasshouse & Halting State (three books) by Charles Stross• The Transparent Society by David Brin• The evolution of Covert Signaling by Paul Smaldino• Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the first peopling of Sahul by Stefani Crabtree et al.• The Tyranny of the Marginal User by Ivan Vendrov• 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly• Blindsight & Echopraxia (two books) by Peter Watts• The Computer as a Communication Device by J.C.R. Licklider & Bob Taylor• Silicon Valley’s quest to remove friction from our lives by Rohit Krishnan• The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction by Kyla Scanlon• Bernhard Seefeld• Situated Software by Clay Shirky• Das Rad (animated short)• Geoffrey West• Mark Pesce• Fred Turner• Robert David SteeleExplore hundreds of related podcast episodes in the archives! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Fostering "Prodigies of Uncertainty" with Layman Pascal 27.01.2026 1h 28m

  The world is getting weirder every day… We need weirdness specialists. Maybe the best guy for the job is my friend, the brilliant “metashaman” (and possible octopus) Layman Pascal. In his own words, Layman “used to be a Canadian meditation teacher, yoga instructor & philosopher of Integral Metatheory but he’s feeling much better now.” He leads the Metamodern Spirituality Labs, hosts The Integral Stage, Soulmakers+, and (forthcoming) Untegral Stage podcasts, and provides unique online courses. He is also a founding member of several think tanks in the developmental psychology and spirituality space, senior editor of Emerge online & is allied to numerous institutes across the field. In addition to many journal and anthology articles, he is the author of Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds, Sex, Death & the Occult, as well as an upcoming book about Nietzsche. Layman is known for his philosophical work on the metaphysics of adjacency, complex nonduality, coaxial developmental stage theories, sacred naturalism, archaic futurism, embodied spirituality & the “integration-surplus model of religion and spirituality” for a post-postmodern civilization facing numerous accelerating and converging crises. In this conversation we cover a lot of ground in a very short time, including: the nature of futurity and how humankind’s relationship to the future is changing; how to surf intense peculiarity'; the abiding sociocultural role of “shamanoid” personalities and other useful weirdos; “wartime” mobilization for The Big Us; and other deep and delightful subjects. It’s my honor to finally decant this year-old recording, now more pertinent than ever…✨ If you enjoy this conversation, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting on your favorite podcast provider to help this work (and you!) find new allies: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Etc.✨ Our next Humans On The Loop book club discussion is for Wendell Berry’s Standing by Words on Sunday February 15th! Become a member to participate in these calls, exclusive Discord members channels, and our monthly hangouts.✨ All of the unedited, unreleased episodes are available to founding members here.More links• Explore the archives for nine years of mind-expanding conversations• Browse (nearly!) all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org•Dig into the Humans On The Loop pitch deck• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere• Contact me if you have burning questions!Cited pieces by Layman• The Soul of AI w/ Lee Chazen (YouTube)• The MetaModern Business Bureau (MMBB) (Substack)• Apocalyptarians (Substack)• The Society of Partial Deterritorialization (Substack)• The Two-Handed Demons (Substack)Cited pieces by others• Wendell Berry - Standing by Words• Hakim Bey - Temporary Autonomous Zone• Steven Johnson - The Revenge of the Humanities• Carol Dweck - Mindset• William James - On Some Mental Effects of the EarthquakeMentioned people with dialogues on my show• Jim Rutt (181)• William Irwin Thompson (42, 43)• Erik Davis (99, 132, 140)• Timothy Morton (223)Mentioned people without dialogues on my show• Terence McKenna (although I’ve interviewed Terence’s brilliant close friends Ken Adams and Bruce Damer multiple times; check the archives for episodes 4, 109, 209)• Alexander Bard• Andrew Huberman• Harry S. Truman• Jacques Lacan• H.P. Lovecraft• Doug Irwin• Nassim Taleb• Friedrich Nietzsche This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Becoming Hyperhuman with Carl Hayden Smith 13.01.2026 1h 18m

  This week we come at technology sideways with help from hyperspace explorer Carl Hayden Smith, Associate Professor of Media at the University of East London (Talks & Papers), Founder of The Museum of Consciousness at New College, University of Oxford , co-founder of the Cyberdelic Nexus, Director at Noonautics and head of Context Engineering at Eleusis.✨ Carl is currently teaching a course on Apocalyptic Hyperhumanism with Layman Pascal at Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal! More info and enrollment here.✨ Our next Humans On The Loop members hangout is this Sunday January 18th at 10:00 am Mountain Time! Calendar invite coming soon for subscribers.✨ All of the unedited, unreleased episodes are available to founding members here.✨ Show Links• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere• Contact me if you have burning questions✨ MentionsMax CooperHunter S. ThompsonDoug Rushkoff Friedrich NietzscheAndrew GallimoreJohn VervaekeK. Allado-McDowellDale PendellJoël de RosnayJoshua DiCaglioCharles EisensteinFred TurnerMark ZuckerbergMichael DouglasRichard BartlettGordon White This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Co-Intelligence & Planetary Perspectives with Rimma Boshernitsan of DIALOGUE 10.11.2025 1h 5m

  Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Discord | FB GroupThis week (actually, April) I speak with Rimma Boshernitsan (Website | LinkedIn), a speaker, interviewer, facilitator, and advisor who has partnered with senior leadership at Fortune 500 companies—including Google, Kaiser Permanente, Roche, TATA, and Aesop—guiding them through transformation and growth. Her writing has appeared in Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, Tech Crunch and Forbes.She began her career in management consulting at Deloitte, focusing on M&A and large-scale transformation, before moving into industry advising across healthcare, consumer business, and telecommunications. Later work in the art world taught her how cultural and political insights could drive innovation and transformation in business, leading her to found DIALOGUE in 2016.She now combines strategic foresight, human-centered innovation, and interdisciplinary thinking to help her clients reframe challenges, identify opportunities, and lead with intention. She sits on the board of trustees at Headlands Center for the Arts and on the SECA Council Board at SFMOMA, and is also an advisor to Stanford’s Women in Design Program.Her most recent focus is in co-intelligence: integrating human, machine, and planetary intelligence to build future-facing organizations.I’m glad to have such an excellent partner in conversation to, as the Taoists say, “Feel our way across the river stone by stone” in a discussion about all of this and more: the re-emergence of nomadic populations and intentional communities, fumbling toward an idea of planetary culture, the role of intuition in leadership and biophilia in the design of our work spaces...it’s a marvelously nondisciplinary co-exploration.There are well over a dozen episodes in the editing queue and founding members can access the entire trove of unedited conversations before they’re released:✨ Show Links• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations• Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Contact me if you have a problem you think I can help you solve• Explore the interactive knowledge graph grown from over 250 episodes• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere✨ Mentioned Media & PeopleIn Threads’ dwindling engagement, social media’s flawed hypothesis is laid bareIn a Time of Stress, Neuroaesthetic Spaces and Places Create a Path to Healing and HopeThe Triad of Intelligences: Harnessing Machine, Planetary, and Human Intuition in The Age of AIDIALOGUE Interviews: Ivy RossDIALOGUE Interviews: Susan MagsamenDIALOGUE Interviews: Kevin KellyMore Is Different: Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of scienceNikki SilvaBruce LiptonEd BernaysKen Wilber This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Co-Evolving with Magical Technologies feat. Sam Arbesman 02.10.2025 1h 24m

  Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts✨ About This EpisodeThis week I talk to Sam Arbesman, scientist-in-residence at Lux Capital, Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation, and host of The Orthogonal Bet, weaving together and plucking at the ideas in his delightful new book, The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connected Our World…and Shapes Our Future. Sam is a brilliant scholar, a maverick mind, and a good friend—so even though we don’t see perfectly eye-to-eye about just where the analogy of code as magic works and where it falls apart, that tiny bit of friction makes for a fascinating joint exploration into the liminal zones where our categories fray and their distinctions are constantly rewritten.In this episode, we discuss:• Sam’s origin story as a code-lover (00:10:20)• Code as “algebra and fire” (00:14:17)• If code is magic, what is magic? (00:20:10)• Open-source development and open-ended innovation (00:25:48)• Rethinking the nature of “failure” in the so-called Technocene (00:32:12)• Navigating simplicity and complexity (00:38:44)• Acceptable and unacceptable sacrifices to the incomprehensibility of our technologies (00:45:02)• The squishy overlap between tech and biology (00:54:03)• The co-domestication of software bugs and people (01:03:22)• And the emerging age of ephemerality (01:15:55)It was, as it always is with Sam, a joy. I hope you get as much out of it as we did.This Saturday at 10 am PDT is the return of our monthly members hangouts. Join us!✨ Show Links• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations• Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Contact me if you have a problem you think I can help you solve• Explore the interactive knowledge graph grown from over 250 episodes• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere✨ Mentioned Reading & PeopleSteven Johnson - Everything Bad Is Good For YouWilliam Alonso - “Predicting Best with Imperfect Data”Danny Hillis - “The Enlightenment Is Dead, Long Live The Entanglement”Moses Maimonides - The Guide To The PerplexedRichard Brautigan - “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”Stewart Brand - The Clock of The Long NowLawrence Lundy-BryanClive ThompsonKevin KellyJose Luis BorgesLionel Snell (Ramsey Dukes)Nadia AsparouhovaUrsula K LeGuinWilliam GibsonDavid KrakauerMichael LevinChris LangtonJim LovelockLynn MargulisAlan MooreJessica FlackMonica AndersonJeremy UtleyAlan PerlisSteve Jobs✨ Mentioned Episodes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Holistic Technology for Growing a World in Love with Larry Muhlstein 22.09.2025 2h 14m

  Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsThis week we hear from Larry Muhlstein, who worked on Responsible AI at Google and DeepMind before leaving to found the Holistic Technology Project. In Larry’s words:“Care is crafted from understanding, respect, and will. Once care is deep enough and in a generative reciprocal relationship, it gives rise to self-expanding love. My work focuses on creating such systems of care by constructing a holistic sociotechnical tree with roots of philosophical orientation, a trunk of theoretical structure, and technological leaves and fruit that offer nourishment and support to all parts of our world. I believe that we can grow love through technologies of togetherness that help us to understand, respect, and care for each other. I am committed to supporting the responsible development of such technologies so that we can move through these trying times towards a world where we are all well together.”In this episode, Larry and I explore the “roots of philosophical orientation” and “trunk of theoretical structure” as he lays them out in his Technological Love knowledge garden, asking how technologies for reality, perspectives, and karma can help us grow a world in love. What is just enough abstraction? When is autonomy desirable and when is it a false god? What do property and selfhood look like in a future where the ground truths of our interbeing shape design and governance?It’s a long, deep conversation on fundamentals we need to reckon with if we are to live in futures we actually want. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.Our next dialogue is with Sam Arbesman, resident researcher at Lux Capital and author of The Magic of Code. We’ll interrogate the distinctions between software and spellcraft, explore the unique blessings and challenges of a world defined by advanced computing, and probe the good, bad, and ugly of futures that move at the speed of thought…✨ Show Links• Hire me for speaking or consulting• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Explore the Humans On The Loop dialogue and essay archives• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts✨ Additional Resources“Growing A World In Love” — Larry Muhlstein at Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming“The Future Is Both True & False” — Michael Garfield on Medium“Sacred Data” — Michael Garfield at Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming“The Right To Destroy” — Lior Strahilevitz at Chicago Unbound“Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul” — Puja Ohlhaver, E. Glen Weyl, and Vitalik Buterin at SSRN✨ MentionsKarl Schroeder’s “Degrees of Freedom”Joshua DiCaglio’s Scale TheoryGeoffrey West’s ScaleHannah ArendtKen WilberDoug Rushkoff’s Survival of the RichestManda Scott’s Any Human Power Torey HaydenChaim Gingold’s Building SimCityJames P. Carse’s Finite & Infinite GamesJohn C. Wright’s The Golden OecumeneEckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now✨ Related Episodes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Taryn Southern on Surfing the Exponential Tech Tsunami 10.09.2025 1h 13m

  Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsToday’s guest Taryn Southern is someone I consider a master surfer of technological change: a fellow elder millennial, artist, creative technologist, strategist, and dancer in the liminal zones of high chop. She’s better than I am at finding the pocket, has made a name for herself for riding some serious bombs, and seems to know precisely when to bail. Starting as an actor, Internet famous for being an early YouTube influencer and her album I Am AI, the first LP composed and produced with an LLM, she caught air at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 with the premier of her documentary I Am Human (co-directed with Elena Gaby), an intimate look at the lives of three people with implantable brain interfaces and the medical, ethical and societal implications.She’s also produced an award-winning musical VR series for Google using Tiltbrush and Blocks, worked as Chief Storyteller for Blackrock Neurotech, minted the first song token on the Ethereum blockchain, spoken and consulted all over the world, operated as an angel investor, and survived breast cancer. In other words, she’s just the person to teach you how to hang ten instead of duck diving under the next pounder. Let’s drop in and grab the rail. Thanks for listening!If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to the complete archives, study groups, and community calls.Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future at Weirdosphere.Show Links• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Explore the Humans On The Loop dialogue and essay archives• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Hire me for speaking or consultingChapters00:00 Introduction: The Promise and Perils of Technology 01:07 Welcome to Humans On the Loop 05:57 Taryn's Early Fascination with Technology 08:55 Living with Constraints and The Spirit of Exploration 31:06 AI in Personal Growth and Communication 38:52 AI as a New Religion and Therapy Tool 42:04 The Ethical Dilemmas of AI and Big Tech 47:58 The Future of AI in Governance and Society 57:42 Empowering Individuals with AI and Community InvolvementMentionsMoon RibasRolf Potts’ VagabondingDamien Walter’s “Modernity is Done”Jim O’ShaughnessySolo: A Star Wars StoryMichael Davis on Exploring the Intersection of AI & RomanceThe Evolution of SurveillanceCory Doctorow’s “enshittification”Howard Rheingold This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Chaim Gingold on Building SimCity & Simulation as Discourse 20.08.2025 1h 26m

  Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsWe live in simulated worlds of our own making, detecting patterns in the chaos and complexity of raw experience and boiling them down into operable categories and generalizations. Sometimes we do this well, and sometimes…This week’s guest, computer scientist and game designer Chaim Gingold, wrote what I consider the best book available on the history and sociality of simulations: Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine (MIT Press) takes readers from the prehistory of modern computing through the post-war development of cybernetics and systems thinking and into the entangled relationship of video games, military info-tech, civil engineering, software-based education, and complexity science that forms today’s “invisible environment.” Sim City is more than a legendary video game. It is case study in how the digital revolution reshaped the ways we think, teach, design, and govern…and how what simulation as a mode of discourse can hide and reveal, oppress and empower us. In this dialogue we explore the the tensions between games and play, the analog and digital, abstraction and tactility, and mysticism and colonialism in simulation-induced experiences. We investigate the rise and fall of Sim City game developer MAXIS, weave threads through the history of computing and software development, systems science, and the philosophy of technology, and ask:What makes some abstractions better than others?If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to the complete archives, study groups, and community calls.Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future at Weirdosphere.Show Links• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Explore the Humans On The Loop dialogue and essay archives• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Hire me for speaking or consultingMentionsWill WrightJohn Conway’s Game of LifeVannevar BushAlan Kay & Xerox PARCEd Catmull - Creativity, Inc.James Clerk MaxwellEthan MollickBrian Sutton-SmithGottfried LiebnizLarry OwensJay ForresterLauren F. KleinEdgar MitchellRusty SchweickertJulian of NorwichChris LangtonKen ForbisMark ZuckerbergElon MuskSam AltmanSam Arbesman - The Magic of CodeTimothy MortonDonna HarawayNick BostromJoshua DiCaglio - Scale TheoryStanislaw Lem - The CyberiadKevin Kelly - Out of ControlStewart Brand & The Whole Earth CatalogFred Turner - From Counterculture to CybercultureDe Kai - Raising AIAnd in case you missed it: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Culture, Consciousness, and the Second Renaissance with Rufus Pollock 10.07.2025 1h 47m

  Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsThis week I speak with Rufus Pollock (Website | Twitter | Wikipedia), former Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge, entrepreneur, activist, author of Open Revolution and Wiser Societies, RSA Fellow, and co-founder of Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, Datopian, and Second Renaissance. Rufus is a key player in the so-called “Liminal Web” and active mapper of the ecosystem of emerging changemaking organizations who, along with his wife Sylvie Barbier and an extensive network of brilliant allies, strives to promote the shifts in consciousness and culture that we need to safely navigate our age of accelerating technology with wiser, weller ways of living together.Together we get into the good, bad, and ugly of our nascent planetary culture — the tension between ecological consciousness and economic force, the demands placed on us to reclaim time-tested strategies for community and meaning in a brave new world, the intertwingling of religion and science, and why technological solutions alone are woefully inadequate (however necessary) as we face our crises of collective action. It’s an earnest, soul-searching, thoughtful, and far-reaching extra-long conversation and I hope that you find as much value in it as we did.If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to our study groups, community calls, and complete archives.Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future at Weirdosphere.Show Links• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Explore the Humans On The Loop archives• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Hire me for speaking or consultingDiscussedFour Types of ProblemSecond Renaissance Whitepaper & Theory of ChangeTechnology as GodGetting over our Allergy to ReligionThe Primacy of BeingDavid Sloan Wilson - Darwin’s CathedralWilliam Irwin Thompson - Imaginary Landscape, The Digital Economy of W. Brian ArthurFederico Campagna - Prophetic CultureAlex Shakar - LuminariumArthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter - The Light of Other DaysJoe Henrich - The WEIRDest People in the WorldJessica Flack - Coarse-Graining as a Downward Causation MechanismMentionedBayo AkomolafeSylvie BarbierLiam KavanaughBret Easton EllisJohn StewartCarl JungDoug RushloffKarl MarxGoetheJamie WhealSteven KotlerKen WilberRobert KeganSuzanne Cook-GreuterPaul LevyGeorge W. BushUrsula K. LeGuinIain McGilchristJim O’ShaughnessyNaval RavikantThich Nhat HanhW. Brian ArthurHazel HendersonJim RuttChristopher AlexanderJamie CurcioJordan PetersonW. B. Yeats This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Lessons from a Metamodern AI Shaman with George Pór 01.07.2025 1h 5m

  Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsThis week we speak with George Pór, mentee of Doug Englebart, Founder of Future HOW, Enlivening Edge, and Campus Co-Evolve, independent scholar with past academic posts at the London School of Economics, INSEAD, UC Berkeley, California Institute of Integral Studies, and Université de Paris, wisdom-guided AI advisor at River, and consultant who has worked with clients including the UN Development Programme, HP, Greenpeace, Intel, Ford, and the World Wildlife Foundation. George has played vital roles our emerging understanding of collective intelligence, knowledge gardening, and online community. In this episode we explore his latest iteration as a Metamodern AI Shaman — what that means, why he’s promoting this approach for the cultivation of hybrid human-machine wisdom, and his theory of change for a reimagined human being in an age of collaborative planet-scale intelligence.Links• Hire me for speaking or consulting• Explore the Humans On The Loop archives• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodesDiscussedExtensive context and background summary provided by George hereRadio evolve #568 - Collective Wisdom and ChatGPT with George PórPrelude to the Rise of the Compassionate AI - George PórAI and Wisdom - George PórA Future of our Interactions with AI - George PórNobel Prize in economics awarded to trio for explaining why some nations are rich and others poor (CNN)Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA - Elisa Heinrich Mora, Cate Heine, Jacob J. Jackson, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, and Christopher P. KempesAI Attending Human Attending AIRelationality - David JaySeeing Like A State - James C. ScottMentioned People & EpisodesLayman PascalFrederic LalouxTimothy MortonAri KushnerStephanie LeppDavid SauvageRoss DawsonStephen ReidTurquoise SoundKate RaworthMatt SegallFrancisco Varela This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Design for Provably Safe AI with Evan Miyazono 24.06.2025 1h 9m

  Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsThis week’s guest is my friend Evan Miyazono, CEO and Director of Atlas Computing — a tech non-profit committed not to the false god of perfect alignment but to plausible strategy of provable safety. Focusing on community building, cybersecurity, and biosecurity, Evan and his colleagues are working to advance a new AI architecture that constrains and formally specifies AI outputs, with reviewable intermediary results, collaborating across sectors to promote this radically different and more empirical approach to applied machine intelligence.After completing his PhD in Applied Physics at Caltech, Evan led research at Protocol Labs, creating their research grants program, and led the special projects team that created Hypercerts, Funding the Commons, gov4git, and key parts of Discourse Graphs and the initial Open Agency Architecture proposal.In our conversation we talk about a wide swath of topics including regulatory scaling problems, specifying formal organizational charters, the spectre of opacity, and the quantification of trust — all, in some sense, interdisciplinary matters of “game design” in our entanglement with magical technologies and fundamental uncertainty.If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to our study groups, community calls, and complete archives. Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future.Links• Hire me for speaking or consulting• Explore the Humans On The Loop archives• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodesDiscussed• Atlas Computing Summary Slides• Atlas Computing Institute Talks (YouTube Playlist)• A Toolchain for AI-Assisted Code Specification, Synthesis and Verification• Also, a relevant paper from Max Tegmark:Provably safe systems: the only path to controllable AGIMentionedGregory BatesonDavid DalrympleK. Allado-McDowellTerence McKennaYuval Noah HarariCosma ShaliziHenry FarrellHakim BeyNatalie DeprazFrancisco VarelaPierre VermerschPlurality InstitutePuja OhlhaverSean Esbjörn-HargensAlfred North WhiteheadDe KaiPrimer RiffAre we doing AI alignment wrong? Game designers Forrest Imel and Gavin Valentine define games as having meaningful decisions, uncertain outcomes, and measurable feedback. If any one of these breaks, the game breaks. And we can think about tech ethics through this lens as well. Much of tech discourse is about how one or more of these dimensions has broken the “game” of life on Earth — the removal of meaningful decisions, the mathematical guarantee of self-termination through unsustainable practices, and/or the decoupling of feedback loops.AI alignment approaches tend to converge on restoring meaningful decisions by getting rid of uncertainty, but it’s a lost cause. It’s futile to encode our values into systems we can’t understand. To the extent that machines think, they think very differently than we do, and characteristically “interpret” our requests in ways that reveal the assumptions we are used to making based on shared context and understanding with other people.We may not know how a black box AI model arrives at its outputs, but we can evaluate those outputs…and we can segment processes like this so that there are more points at which to review them. One of this show’s major premises is that the design and use of AI systems is something like spellcraft — a domain where precision matters because the smallest deviation from a precise encoding of intent can backfire.Magic isn’t science in as much as we can say that for spellcraft, mechanistic understanding is, frankly, beside the point. Whatever you may think of it, spellcraft evolved as a practical approach for operating in a mysterious cosmos. Westernized Modernity dismisses magic because Enlightenment era thinking is predicated on the knowability of nature and the conceit that everything can and will eventually bend to principled, rigorous investigation. But this confused accounting just reshuffled its uneradicable remainder of fundamental uncertainty back into a stubbornly persistent Real that continues to exist in excess of language, mathematics, and mechanistic frameworks. Economies, AI, and living systems guarantee uncertain outcomes — and in accepting this, we have to re-engage with magic in the form of our machines. The more alike they become, the more our mystery and open-ended co-improvisation loom back over any goals of final knowledge and control.In a 2016 essay, Danny Hillis called this The Age of Entanglement. It is a time that calls for an evolutionary approach to technology. Tinkering and re-evaluating, we find ourselves one turn up the helix in which quantitative precision helps us reckon with the new built wilderness of technology. When we cannot fully explain the inner workings of large language models, we have to step back and ask:What are our values, and how do we translate them into measurable outputs?How can we break down the wicked problem of AI controllability into chunks on which it’s possible to operate?How can adaptive oversight and steering fit with existing governance processes?In other words, how can we properly task the humanities with helping us identify “meaningful decisions” and the sciences with providing “measurable feedback.” Giving science the job of solving uncertainty or defining our values ensures we’ll get as close as we can to certitude about outcomes we definitely don’t want. But if we think like game designers, then interdisciplinary collaboration can help us safely handle the immense power we’ve created and keep the game going. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe
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  Religions of the Future & The New Monstrous with Rina Nicolae 10.06.2025 1h 24m

  Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsWhat the hell is going on with culture right now? The Web is running evolution in fast-forward, remixing the very substrates of identity and personhood in a molten broil of post-ironic, post-human, post-truth meme-play that reminds me of nothing more than the porous networked selfhood of bacterial in a molten wash of horizontal gene transfer. RIP the genre and all hail the hyper-real individual as institution, the self-fulfilling prophecies of [EDIT: Guy Debord’s] society of the spectacle [and Baudrillard’s simulation], the revenge of religion as our accelerating techno-social evolution prompts a kind of reversal as the movement of the Tao that challenges the dreams and ideals of the Enlightenment…it is a time of monsters, a rapid recombination of worlds and ways of living in them. How to make sense of it all…or is making sense even a viable strategy when rifts and ruptures are the name of the game?Amidst the chaos of pop culture and mainstream news, my friend Rina Nicolae of Incognita swims comfortably as a thoughtful commentator. Riffing philosophically on network society and its discontents, the emergent spiritual traditions of digital natives, and the posthuman bestiary of our AI- and biotech-saturated century, Rina’s Substack is a handbook to the cyborg aesthetic, the imagistic/algorithmic complex of online identity, our entanglement with capital and the possession by and performance of meme-space.How do we not become caricatures of ourselves in the world-creating and -destroying flood of remix culture? How do we cultivate roughness, fractality, wildness, illegigility? How do we stay, as Cadell Last put it in the previous episode, “in the gaps and cracks” instead of becoming prey to the new monsters of the unleashed imagination? How do we *befriend* those monsters?William Irwin Thompson said noise characterizes the emergence of planetary culture — an age in which “Technology slays the victim” of the mind “resurrects it as art” in a new ecology of consciousness. If, then, the only way through is up and out, then join me as, once more, we dive into the noise and make music together with Rina…Links• Hire me for speaking or consulting• Explore the Humans On The Loop archives• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Join the Wisdom x Technology (open) & Future Fossils (legacy) Discord serversDiscussedProphets Of A Machine FutureWhat Is Posthumanism?The New MonstrousMilady Infiltrates The VaticanKim Kardashan Was Never HumanThe AI That Can Change Your MindMentionedPriya RoseDonna HarawayBobby AzarianDavid DeutschJack HalberstamJulia ChristevaTimothy MortonK. Allado-McDowellMary ShelleyBenjamin BrattonCharlotte FangMarshall McLuhanJimi HendrixTaryn SouthernJim O’ShaughnessyKevin Kelly This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.humansontheloop.com/subscribe